So we should start with the name. He is Shawn Carter, son of Gloria and Adnis. That’s only his government name, though. He is Jay-Z, or just Jay. Jay-hova, God MC. Hova, Hovito, Hovi Baby, Young Hov. Young. Jigga. S Dot Carter. If his name is the only thing that matters, why does he keep changing it? Or does each name say something different, if only a little? So, are the many names alter egos? Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out that the Latin alter ego, contrary to its played out modern usage, suggests nothing less than “an otherness immanent in selfness, a becoming other of the self,” whose closest analogue is the friend. Alter egos: a multiple self, as if composed like a group of friends. Jay-Z, government name Shawn Carter, is multiple. To investigate the multiple self in the American context, we might look to W.E.B. Dubois’ 1903 classic The Souls of Black Folk, which has been called the “first mixtape” (A mixtape is opposed to an album in the way it is a composite of heterogeneous pieces–multiple instead of a homogeneous whole).

In the seminal work, Dubois describes a “twoness,” or “double-consciousness,” which the African American necessarily experiences:

One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The Duboisian “double-consciousness” is the duality of a sense of oneself combined with and countered by the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” To be both oneself and outside of oneself.

“There are sometimes two Jay-Zs,” says Jay in his autobiography. Rap music, so often attacked by lames and white old heads for being “contradictory,” is precisely what allows Jay-Z to explore his “twoness”:

In some ways, rap was the ideal way for me to make sense of a life that was doubled, split into contradictory halves. This is one of the most powerful aspects of hip-hop as it evolved over the years. Rap is built to handle contradictions…But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn’t force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas.

Another Brooklynite, Walt Whitman, wrote in his 1855 poem “Song of Myself”,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Jay echoes Whitman, perhaps consciously, tying the multiple self to the matter of names: “I never had to reject Shawn Carter to become Jay-Z…those two characters come together through the rhymes, become whole again. The multitude is contained.” But Jay-Z builds upon Whitman’s multitude, making each name a “character,” suggesting a necessarily performative dimension to one’s being. Being a character doesn’t make each persona false but, rather, achieves the truth of the condition of multiplicity.

But this nomenclatorial aspect is just the beginning, merely the surface. How is the self, or each self, composed? Jay-Z puts it simply: “Everything I’ve seen made me everything I am.” Jay is describing what we might call the environment-individual, with the boundary between the self and one’s environment becoming blurred. Jay-Z is Brooklyn. Marcy. Jay-Z is constituted by the things he’s seen. A man of memory. The present as representation. Now is then and all the thens. This concept is one of the primary refrains in Jay-Z’s oeuvre.

Consider the many constitutional memories Jay-Z presents in his body of work. The golden memories of Gloria, the complex relationship with the estranged Adnis. The reveries of childhood in “I Made It” and “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me).” Leaving the innocence of childhood, the classic “Can I Live,” on Jay’s debut Reasonable Doubt is an invitation to the listener to witness the making of a child into a hustler (“The youth I used to be”). From “Dope Man”: “I was nine when I saw my first hate crime.” Evoking both the Duboisian and the Whitmanesque, the first line of “Can I Live” describes a web or network of watching and being watched in the hood: “While I’m watching every nigga watching me closely…”. A memory of being watched. “Not only cokeheads but the Feds in the Mercury Topaz.” Continuing his tendency toward memory, Jay-Z’s sophomore record began a series of albums, the In My Lifetime trilogy. Not insignificantly, Jay-Z’s website is also called Life and Times. Lifetime: life and time, the interplay between oneself and the inexorable circumstances in which one exists. Memory is a replaying of that passage of the self through time. Everything I’ve seen made me everything I am. An eternal return of each moment.

It is appropriate to return briefly to the BK’s original poet, Walt Whitman, an artist for whom memory and the passage of time were central. From Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme.”

Here, Whitman uses the word “scheme” where Jay-Z might use the words “lifetime” or “circumstance” (“I’m a prisoner of circumstance,” from “Dope Man”). Whitman sees himself “disintegrated” into the scheme, into that which surrounds. Everything he sees makes him everything he is. “[I am] not contain’d between my hat and boots,” in “Song of Myself.” He is everything. And so everything is everything, like Mary J Blige says. But Whitman still returns to the “self” in these scenarios. He calls it the “Song of Myself,” for Christ’s sake. So somehow, for Whitman, oneself is indiscernible from the “scheme,” yet the self remains.

This crisis of self is solved, for Jay-Z, in rap. In the act of rapping. In his autobiography, Jay-Z explains life and time in terms of rap music:

[Rap is] built around two kinds of rhythm. The first kind of rhythm is the meter. In poetry, the meter is abstract, but in rap, the meter is something you literally hear: it’s the beat. The beat in a song never stops, it never varies…It’s like time itself, ticking off relentlessly in a rhythm that never varies and never stops.

Meter, the beat, is Whitman’s “scheme.”

But the beat is only one half of a rap song’s rhythm. The other is the flow. When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow breaks the beat into smaller units, forces in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch. The flow isn’t like time, it’s like life.

In a way, the life-time duality is made whole in rap for Jay-Z. To rap is to create a simulacrum of the act of living. Also, to rap is to experience disintegration–but a disintegration which is not a negation but, rather, an expansion of the self. An ever-expanding, diffuse connectedness. But while this might suggest an almost infinitesimal smallness, Jay-Z echoes Whitman in finding the opposite: “I’d rather die enormous than live dormant.” For both Brooklyn poets, it is a vast multitude which constitutes the self, and the self is within the multitude.